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By Mihar Dias October 2026
How touching. A deputy minister has remembered that university students are allowed to notice corruption. Adam Adli, once a campus firebrand and now safely installed in the Higher Education Ministry, has declared that Universiti Malaya student Ummi Umairah Bakhit’s remarks about graft, power abuse and the “stupidest thing” she has ever seen—people throwing money at Najib’s RM50 million fine—amount to fair comment. https://www.malaysiakini.com/news/887275-deputy-minister-defends-students-criticism-of-corruption-power-abuse-at-forum
Universities, he says, must remain spaces for debate. Students should not be moulded into unquestioning followers. Criticism of those in authority is healthy. Democracy requires listening even to the unpleasant.
One almost wants to applaud. Almost.
The performance is familiar. A young woman stands up in a ministry-backed forum, looks three politicians in the eye, and points out the obvious: that a culture of defending the indefensible is still very much with us. The remarks go viral. Within days the deputy minister issues a carefully worded defence. DAP youth leaders issue a solidarity statement. Everyone suddenly discovers Article 10 and the need to repeal the Universities and University Colleges Act. The script writes itself.
Notice what is being defended. A student criticising the previous regime’s most famous convict and the feudal reflexes that still surround him. That is safe territory. It costs the current government nothing. It even flatters it. “See how open we are? Our students can speak!” The same openness has a shorter lifespan when the criticism turns toward living power—procurement scandals that do not involve the other side, political appointments that look like patronage, or the slow gap between rhetoric and delivery. Then the language tends to shift from “fair comment” to “responsible speech,” “academic maturity,” or the need to “avoid politicising campuses.”
Adam Adli’s own journey is instructive. Student activists who survive long enough often discover that the system has a remarkable capacity to absorb them. Yesterday’s firebrand becomes today’s official guardian of “intellectual maturity.” The conversion is rarely crude; it is gradual, institutional, and dressed in the language of responsibility. The result is a selective defence of free speech: encouraged when it targets yesterday’s villains, managed when it inconveniences today’s tenants of power.
Universities were never meant to be finishing schools for obedient technocrats. They are supposed to be places where young people learn to distinguish power from legitimacy. When a student calls a public fundraising drive for a convicted former prime minister an exercise in collective stupidity, she is doing the job. The real test is not whether the ministry can issue a press statement in her defence. The real test is whether the next student who stands up and names different names receives the same protection, the same solidarity statements, the same pious lectures about democratic values.
Until that symmetry appears, the current outbreak of tolerance looks less like principle and more like political convenience. Students should keep speaking. They should just not mistake the applause for a blank cheque. Power rarely objects to criticism of its predecessors. It objects, with great consistency, to criticism of itself.
Mihar Dias (mihardias@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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